Castle Paradox

[St. Ajora]

Lately, I've been thinking way too hard about the dilemma of healing in RPGs. Most, the awful ones, make it way too easy to heal even major wounds, both in and out of battle. Some limit healing in battle but make it very easy out of battle, like Xenogears or Legend of Mana. Some make healing more expensive out of battle, like FF9.

Reviving your characters, too. The easier games make it no big deal to revive all your dead characters to a decent amount of life. Again, some games revive all characters after battles are over, like KOTOR and Chrono Trigger.

I've been thinking that the best combination, the one that makes for the most strategic battles, is what Square had going since the very beginning. Final Fantasy. Healing is easier in-battle, to a certain extent, because you get items that cast HEAL on your party. Outside of battle, you're forced to use spells or potions, which you'll quickly run out of. On the other hand, you can't revive in-battle. It's not possible. If a character's dead, you'll have to finish the battle without him.

I can't think of another healing system I like nearly as well. Your thoughts?

[The Wobbler]

[Moogle1]

I'm pretty sure that in the original NES version, it never worked inside battle. The Dawn of Souls remake has it work, but then it adds Phoenix Downs, too. Lame.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Iblis]

I think what's more important than where/when you can heal or revive is balancing the effects with the cost (actually, that's not even specific to healing). Usually though the only cost is "it uses MP and a turn" or "it uses up an item and a turn." There are different ways you could do this.

You could have the spells take an inordinate amount of time. I don't mean necessarily before you cast the spell, that just means there's a good chance the person will die before you can heal them. Well, what about having a wait time after performing an action? I think that would be a lot better. The character would perform an action right when you told them to, but then the wait time afterward could be longer or shorter depending on what that action was, cause they'd need to recharge.

Something else you could do is make it so when you revive an ally in battle they come back asleep. It kinda makes sense, I mean if they're dead they might not be in the best condition when you revive them. Usually this is done by reviving them low HP, but like with most things, there are other ways to do it.

Or there could be a risk that the wounds would transfer to the healer. Like there could be a random chance that if one character heals another, the former might get damaged by some fraction of the healing they performed on their target. This could work well with status ailments too. It would be especially good if with practice/special equipment a healer might get better at doing it so that the risk was lessened. I mean, giving your characters a handicap they can never get rid of is kinda lame. There should always be room for improvement.

Of course, none of these are mutually exclusive. They could easily work together and with the MP system or others. What's important to remember is that there are always other ways of doing things. Sometimes the other ways are good and sometimes they're not, but it's important to know that they exist.

[Me]

In the majority of RPG-style games with HP and such, the HP meter is really more of a combined total of a character's stamina, dodging ability, blocking ability, fortitude, and actual physical health. Thus, when they are "damaged," it really means more like "they are slightly less able to absorb more attacks." When they hit 0 HP, in concurrence with this, they are usually labeled as "KO," not "dead." With this in mind, a healing spell is really more of a re-energizing spell rather than an actual medical incantation, and it becomes much more plausible.

Of course, if the standard HP is as I have described, a character's fighting ability should be hindered as his or her HP gets lowered. In most RPGs, the opposite is true, the characters actually gaining power after a certain amount of damage. The exception I can think of off the top of my head would be, interestingly enough, Ultima Weapon in Fina Fantasy VII - its power decreases as Cloud's HP decreases. Of course, this is only true with that one weapon in particular. In terms of Life2-style spells, I believe the Fire Emblem series wins (although I haven't played any of the games), as I belive there a "dead" character is dead for at least the remainder of the battle.

It would be neat to see a game with a real ability-degradation system in place, where attacks damaged health AND agility AND stamina AND accuracy, resulting in drastically weaker characters in all respects at lower HPs. This would be a hard system to balance - given how actual fighting works, characters would have to dodge FAR more often and deal and take FAR more damage. In a case like that, a healing skill would need to take a longer period, and also take both characters (healer and the one being healed) out of the action for a period. Both characters would then have to be made far more easy to hit, thus making healing "in the fray" an unadvisable strategy. To make up for this, a system allowing other characters to protect the healer and his/her patient could be implemented.

I think the best system to implement these ideas would be a tactics-style one, rather than the typical turnbased, FF/DW style system, which does far far better with the more symbolic system that most RPGs use.

You bring up a very good point here, though.
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UP DOWN UP DOWN LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT A B START

[Uncommon]

Regarding Me's theories of HP effecting other stats, you can set the stat used to calculate attack/defense so that HP serves as both, thus making a character weaker. For example, in Mr. T's Fantastic Adventure, I made MP and Defense the same stat, so the one character that used magic grew weaker with each spell she casted. It could make for an interesting system with HP.

[Me]

Those ideas can be applied to things other than health, too - a magic-using character might not become so much physically tired as mentally exhausted in battle, thus perhaps their intelligence/magic stat could decrease with every cast, allowing them to cast as many spells as they liked, but decreasing the power of said spells over time.
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UP DOWN UP DOWN LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT A B START

[RPGrealm5]

I thought Golden Sun did a good job by making the Water of Life (Revival Items) hard to find, or expensive. That way, you'd think twice before using one in a battle.

One thing that has annoyed me is when you try to revive someone, and your enemy just kills them the second you do it. If there were some way to avoid that, it would be more fun.

I think that there should be different classes of revival items, ones that are cheaper and revive less HP (With the high risk of random status effects.), a medium one (With small risk of status effects.) And a full revival, with no status effects upon use. That way, one has to be aware and think smart when they are trying to play out a battle.
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Gyu, Doh!

[Iblis]

[Moogle1]

I'm an awful RPG player. I fear using anything that I won't have anymore. That's why I still had Arctic Winds or whatever it is that casts Ice-2 when I beat FF3.

I also hate using up my MP, which is one reason I liked FF2's system: it made me want to use it. Healing was pretty hard in FF2, too, but revival was so easy that often you didn't care that 3/4 of your party was at critical HP. (Sometimes you even wanted it that way, too, so their HP would level up. Talk about a screwy system, but I liked it for some reason.)
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[LeRoy_Leo]

[Me]

[Machu]

I've been thinking about Health systems for quite some time. Characters really shouldn't get stronger with less HP, such as FF8's Limit breaks. A person might get an adrenaline rush or more determination when hurt, but there are other ways of portraying this. In a system where your skills decrease with your HP, make it stop decreasing at a certain point, or reduce the effect. For example, make it so you never act worse than 25% of your HP, or cut the penalty in half after 50% damage.

I've got a different way of seeing "revive" spells. I think the HP should be kept track of, even when negative. When the person is dead or KO'd, you still need to use healing spells to bring their HP to positive. You can then awaken a person with a revive technique, because if you tried it while their HP is still less than 1, they would still be critically wounded and die/pass out. An "instant death" spell could kill them without hurting their HP, so they can be revived right away. I'd like to see a system like this, because getting killed by a huge attack should be much harder to recover from than getting barely finished off.

What was a realistic system I saw... oh, Silent Storm! It was a tactical RPG in World War II. Whenever you were hurt, you'd get some penalties like less action points, lower accuracy, or bleeding so you lose more hit points. When you have a medic try to heal, it takes a turn or two and the person being healed can't move. I like how this game handles a lot of things, and I've only played the demo.

If I think of more to say later, I'll post again.
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[Iblis]

[Mr B]

This is a problem that I have also struggled with. I was troubled by the tension between two points: curative abilities and healing items.

If curative abilities are low-cost, then they can be used to the exclusion of items, which makes them effectively useless at best and removes a very useful method of spending money.

If healing items are low-cost, then they can be bought in large numbers and effectively make every character a healer, rendering healing classes useless.

I solved the problem for a game that I am working on by realizing that I couldn't think about the two things "one-dimensionally." They don't have to exclude each other, so much as complement each other.

I made healing skills to be quick, powerful, and expensive (in terms of MP). They are extremely effective, and they cost what they're worth. Healing items are free and can be used by anyone, but they slow down the target by a small amount for the duration of the battle.

This means that healing items can be used for short battles and one maps, but healing abilities are the only thing for prolonged or boss battles. After two or three items are used on a character the slowing is noticable.

This means that items are definately worth buying, but can not be used to replace healers or make battles go on until the computer crashes.

I really like the idea of spells getting less effective as they are used. I thought of that a long time ago, but I was never able to develop it as fully as it has been in here. Definitaly something to think about.